Long Way Round — London to New York, the eastbound route

Where to start? How about London, where Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor, both die-hard motorcycle guys (incidentally, McGregor is also a movie star), sat around musing about the ultimate biker boys’ “what if.”

What if we take two bikes and go from London, east across Europe, then through the vastness of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, then fly the bikes across to Alaska, ride down through Canada and the U.S., and end up in New York City?

Well, yes, it can be done, and they did it and you can watch it on a great set of videos. (More information at the “Long Way Round” Web site.)

What makes this vicarious journey of some 19,000 miles all the more compelling to the armchair bike aficionado is the fact that the motorcycles are only one part of it. Much of the video journey shows McGregor and Boorman interacting with the people they meet along the way and it’s clear that these are two regular guys, with a quick sense of humor and no airs of movie-stardom or anything else.

They genuinely liked the people they met and they were curious about the ways these people live. They also hooked up with UNICEF and, along the way, filmed UNICEF projects that help disadvantaged children.

The bikes, of course, do play a serious role in this adventure. McGregor and Boorman (33 and 37 years old, respectively, when the journey was made, in the spring of 2004) took monster-looking BMW R1150GS Adventure bikes, provided by the manufacturer. (Boorman wanted to take KTMs, but the Austrian company declined to provide them with bikes. Bad PR move. BMW got priceless publicity out of “Long Way Round.”)

There are grueling scenes of the bikes getting stuck in mud up to their center hubs; days of being able to travel only 20 miles in a couple of hours because of the horrible terrain (roads were a luxury in Mongolia); repeated scenes of the bikes hitting ruts in what passed for roads, or ruts in fields, or rushing rivers, then suddenly flopping over on their sides.

Finally, they put the bikes on a plane in Magadan, Russia, flew them to Anchorage, Alaska, and then drove down through Canada and the U.S. to New York. The whole thing is mesmerizing, even if the North American leg, with its smooth highways and comfortable motels, translates into something of an anticlimax. (For those of us who can’t get enough of this kind of motorbike adventuring, the boys did another trip, “Long Way Down,” riding from Scotland to South Africa in 2007.)

You can get the DVDs of these two trips at a number of Web sites. It’s definitely worth it.

Fact is, it made me go out to the garage and spend more than a few minutes looking at the bike, sitting there silently, under its dust cover. What if?